Satyajit Ray Our Films Their Films, published by Hyperion in the US - it's an excellent anthology of his criticism, along with some journal/work notes - tons of very rigorous commentary on Bollywood, along with very insightful pieces on Kurosawa, Italian neo-realism, Truffaut, French new-wave, Chaplin and others...

I'm a big fan of Robin Wood's Hollywood: from Vietnam to Reagan...and Beyond. Maybe it's just because I share his interest in unappreciated films, eras and genres, but I found a lot of really interesting insights within the pages, and it even changed my opinion a few films and directors. There's some great stuff about Romero (particularly Day of the Dead), De Palma and Cohen, and even though he's pretty rough on Fincher, I somehow gained a new interest in his films from reading Wood's interpretations.

Just found a softcover copy of "The Parade's Gone By" by Kevin Brownlow ! INCREDIBLE book about early Film history all over the world.

Another find was the excellent and very out of print "WC Fields By Himself". It's a collection of letters script extracts, memorabilia all held together by actual segments of an unpublished autobiography written by Fields himself...about himself. Even those who don't like Fields will love this book.

It's one of those picture books and I was pleasantly surprised by the great attention to detail, thougtfulness, and LOTS of rare pictures, some of them behind the camera and in color. Top shelf for $19.99 and ESSENTIAL !

I own about 15 of these little volumes. Most of them have something worthwhile, even if they're utterly wrong-headed or focused on a single bizarre interpretation (Chion's Eyes Wide Shut comes close to this category, although it's very well written). My favorites, though, are Salman Rushdie's very personal (and terribly funny) The Wizard of Oz, Jonathan Rosenbaum's illuminating Dead Man, and Simon Louvish's detailed reading of It's a Gift, the chapter titles of which are direct quotes from the movie ("Those were my mother's feathers", "Closed on account of molasses").

We seem to cover this in every incarnation of the forum. It's a great series, but I highly recommend you search out older discontinued series as well, such as the Indiana University filmguides from 1973 that feature Bordwell's Passion of Joan of Arc and Naremore's Psycho; the Focus On... series that covered genres, directors, and specific films (Blow Up and Seventh Seal are particularly good); the Praeger series from the '60's featuring Movie critics on such topics as Fritz Lang and Antonioni; and the fine BFI "Cinema One" series from the late '60's that first published many works on directors, such as Wood's Howard Hawks as well as classics on Lewton, Melville, and Wollen's Signs and Meanings in the Cinema).

I enjoyed the EWS book, especially Chion's focus on repetition (narrative, visual, verbal, and parroting) and Shnitzler's novella (and Kubrick's pointed deviations from it). It's easy to pick out one approach to the film and attack it (in particular, his hypothesis that one could see the film from the viewpoint of their as-yet-unfertilized fetus); I read that as an interesting take on the reconciliation and final line, but it's not nearly as heavily treated in the book as Chion's breakdown of the narrative structure. Like some enthusiastic criticism, he throws in ideas that seem difficult to support; many of my favorite critics, including Rosenbaum, Wood, Nelson, Cameron, and Fujiwara, go too far in my estimation, yet I still learn so much from their writing that I don't mind ideas that stretch credulity. I see criticism and theory as just tools to help me appreciate the art; I take what's useful to me and shrug off what I don't understand or disagree with. There are a number of critics that I struggle to understand (Bordwell, Telotte, Durgnat, Thompson, Wollen, Mulvey) but still enjoy enough of their ideas that I want to understand them more fully. It comes down to your confidence as a film reader; you should be able to discern good from bad criticism, depending on how well an idea is argued. But whether something is useful to you in undertanding a work of art may have very little to do with how well (or not) it is argued; sometimes a poorly-supported but insightful idea may lead you to a new appreciation for an aspect of film that you might otherwise not have considered. That's why I like to read the single-film volumes from older series (such as the Indiana Press) as well, though they are more difficult to find (they used to be holy grails; at least with the internet, they are now only an Alibris or Amazon or Half.com away).

goofbutton wrote:Are any of the other BFI series worth picking up? I'm especially interested in the THIN RED LINE and EYES WIDE SHUT volumes.

The monograph on The Thin Red Line is good. Chion is given to purple prose and flights of fancy, but his writing is engaging and his ideas engaging. Unsurprisingly for Chion, his discussions of sound and narration make for the book's strongest points. But I did notice a few factual errors in his discussion, which are probably attributable to the difficulty of understanding the film in translation (or via subtitles, or for those whose first language is not English). For example, he attributes the last lines of voiceover ("Look out on the things you made.... All things shining.") to Witt, from beyond the grave, which I'm fairly sure is wrong.

filmfan wrote:Just found a softcover copy of "The Parade's Gone By" by Kevin Brownlow ! INCREDIBLE book about early Film history all over the world.

I whole wholeheartedly agree with your mention of "The Parades Gone By". Its the most interesting book on silent film that I've yet read. Since it was written in 1963 (I think) most of the interviews where done specifically for that book. There are also something like 600 pictures. The only think it lacked for me was that it didn't feature anything on silent horror.

King of Kong wrote:David Bordwell and (his wife) Kristin Thompson's Film History: An Introduction has been my bible for all things cinema for quite some time. It is pricey - but worth every cent.

It's not pricey. Just get a non-current edition for ten bucks. Bordwell's new Figures Traced in Light is definitely worth $26 for you Mizoguchi/Angelopolous/Hou/Feuillade fans (he covers many more filmmakers.) The annotations alone are more incisive and interesting than most books you'll find. His book on Ozu is indispensable (though pricey, I found one in a local library and photocopied pages a little at a time til I got through it, saved $70 though.)

David Desser's Eros Plus Massacre is flat out *great*. Interesting commentary on the Japanese New Wave (and when it strays from that topic it's just as interesting.)

Cassavettes on Cassavettes is a good read as well (there's a lot of bowtied Carney filler though.) Bfi's L'argent, by Kent Jones and the Cinemateque Ontario book edited by Quandt about Bresson is easily the most comprehensive written about one of the world's best directors. Cook's Narrative History of Film is great and I managed to read the whole thing... twice. Its like an unedited film bible.

My question is what's the best Film magazine? I'm leading towards Film Quarterly, but Film Comment has some great pieces on completely unheard of directors, and is bi-monthly compared to the former. Paste *can* have a decent film section, but most of it seems like filler to me. I wish Cahiers du cinema was translated to english...

This is always an interesting topic for me. I think it depends on the editorial board, their focus, the writers they employ, and these all change over time. For example, I enjoyed many of the Richard Corliss-era Film Comment issues, which were broad enough in scope to cover Hitchcock and Hawks alongside features on Joe Bob Briggs and MST3K. Although Gavin Smith's current run is noticeably more global in tone, I find a great deal of interest and learn something in every issue I read (plus they still allow for occasional lowbrow articles like Kevin Smith's take on the new Star Wars episodes). Sight and Sound is wildly uneven but very entertaining when it's a topic I appreciate (Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick, Fight Club, Kiarostami). I don't understand many of the Film Quarterly issues, but I was not a film student (caveat emptor). Literature and Film Quarterly is usually way over my head, but they have had a few articles in the last few years that particularly enlightened me. My two favorite current periodicals would be Cineaste and CineAction (Robin Wood's Canadian 3-per-year magazine).

I happened to shop for new issues today, leaving behind Film Quarterly and Sight and Sound (no interest in any of the articles or writers) while picking up Film Comment (J.Hoberman on Schwartzenegger, K.Jones on Sarris, R.Combs on Michael Powell), Cineaste (Fujiwara on Testament of Dr. Mabuse, book reviews on film noir and Orson Welles, DVD reviews of Boris Barnet and Bunuel's Robinson Crusoe), and CineAction (A.I., Metropolis, Big Sleep, Topaz, music in Renoir).

As a final note, I found this interesting in Wood's editorial "Questions of Value" in the current CineAction Issue 66:

I intended a challenge to what has been for the past few decades the dominant modes and concerns of academic film study, specifically its overwhelming emphasis on theory. I believe that our primary concern should be with the specific work, its meaning, the kind and degree of its achievement, its place within the history of our culture, in short its value. If theory can help us towards this end, well and good, but it should accept its role as relatively humble and supportive. One consequence of its dominance has been in my view disastrous: it has been responsible for finally destroying the always precarious continuity between academia and a more general readership, a wider public with a serious interest in the arts and specifically in film. In effect it has left criticism to the weekly reviewers.

I've yet to find a film magazine that I've liked. The only one I've ever subscribed to, AC, has gone steadily downhill, and is now pretty much nothing but a Hollywood promotion rag (not that it has been terrible much more than that for as long as I've known it). Occasionally interesting from a technical perspective, it treats Tomb Raider, any TV miniseries, and Wong Kar-Wai with the same sort of reverence, as though each was a great film. Occasionally I like articles in Sight & Sound.

Over the past year, I've found I visit the Bright Lights Film Journal site with less frequency, and it's somewhat due to the fact that I don't care to suffer through any more of Vanneman's writing. He's far too deliberately dismissive of everything and it often feels as if he's writing just to make the most crude and juvenile comments.

In response to Godot's incitement of discussion on that Robin Wood snippet...

Discussing specific works is great, but I feel that such discussions should be a jumping off point for examining more pervasive cultural issues. Some theory is necessary to elucidate the ways in which a particular film acts on the viewer as a piece of media in todayâ€™s culture. And the latter dynamic is, to me, the most important element we can consider. I want accessible analysis of works of art to be a means of discussing theories of culture and mediation. Yes, aesthetics has consistently been the prime criterion for analysis, but the cultural urgency I feel is now preventing me from simply being able to immerse myself in total aesthetic (Tarantino, for instance) without regarding the cultural value of my act. (Yes, Iâ€™m kind of going crazy.)

I havenâ€™t read a ton of theory, film or otherwise, but from the general pulse I gather that a kind of scholarly gamesmanship reigns supreme, eliminating most of the criticâ€™s regard for that more general readership to which Wood refers.

Then again, just reading some of the summaries for seminal film theory essays contained in the anthology Film Theory and Criticism (ed. Braudy and Cohen) gets me extremely excited. Iâ€™m anxious to jump into them.

Do you have a link to the full article or is it print only? Iâ€™d like to get a more specific idea of the type of theory Wood laments.

I intended a challenge to what has been for the past few decades the dominant modes and concerns of academic film study, specifically its overwhelming emphasis on theory. I believe that our primary concern should be with the specific work, its meaning, the kind and degree of its achievement, its place within the history of our culture, in short its value. If theory can help us towards this end, well and good, but it should accept its role as relatively humble and supportive. One consequence of its dominance has been in my view disastrous: it has been responsible for finally destroying the always precarious continuity between academia and a more general readership, a wider public with a serious interest in the arts and specifically in film. In effect it has left criticism to the weekly reviewers.

Good for Robin Wood. I knew him back in the mid-90s when he was on the fence regarding current academic film study, and am glad he decided to jump down firmly on the rights side with both feet.

Discussing specific works is great, but I feel that such discussions should be a jumping off point for examining more pervasive cultural issues. Some theory is necessary to elucidate the ways in which a particular film acts on the viewer as a piece of media in today?s culture. And the latter dynamic is, to me, the most important element we can consider.

Of course cinema studies must necessarily relate to culture at large, but why treat it as a subsidiary of general media theory? What's happened in film studies departments at most universities is that textual analysis, canon-building, and film history has all but disappeared. They are graduating students who can wax poetic about the grand ideological effect of cinema reception in a mass capitalism setting without having the slightest clue about why Griffith invented the close-up.

duane hall wrote:I want accessible analysis of works of art to be a means of discussing theories of culture and mediation.

This approach is fine but it doesn't belong in the cinema studies department. That's why other departments (English, Liberal Arts, Japanese, German, etc.) offer film courses- so that cinema can be studied in the context of some broader cultural concern. But film departments should concentrate on cinema as a specific medium. They should be educating students to be film experts- not critical/cultural experts.

duane hall wrote:Do you have a link to the full article or is it print only? I?d like to get a more specific idea of the type of theory Wood laments.

Check out Film Quarterly, Bright Lights Film Journal, or Cinema Journal for they type of theory Wood is lamenting.

For a brilliant attack on this type of theory, check out Bordell and Carroll's Post-Theory.

Langlois68 wrote:Good for Robin Wood. I knew him back in the mid-90s when he was on the fence regarding current academic film study, and am glad he decided to jump down firmly on the rights side with both feet.

This has really been the tendency in cinema studies for a long time now, though. Wood is hardly proposing a radical new direction for cinema studies. At the recent cinema studies conference in London in March of this year, only a very small percentage of the papers presented were theory papers, where in the past they would have been the majority.

Langlois68 wrote:What's happened in film studies departments at most universities is that textual analysis, canon-building, and film history has all but disappeared.

I don't think this is true, at least not widely. Textual analysis and film history are surely emphasized; canon-building, for whatever that's worth, is regarded suspiciously (as it should be), but mostly tacitly accepted.

Langlois68 wrote:This approach is fine but it doesn't belong in the cinema studies department. That's why other departments (English, Liberal Arts, Japanese, German, etc.) offer film courses- so that cinema can be studied in the context of some broader cultural concern. But film departments should concentrate on cinema as a specific medium. They should be educating students to be film experts- not critical/cultural experts.

I think they need to do both. For my money (and indeed I am paying a lot for my education), textual analysis on its own isn't worth very much without a broader cultural/historical perspective. In order to understand in any fundamental way the meaning, impact, and importance of a certain period of, say, Chinese cinema, or even a single Chinese film, one has to understand the broader cultural and historical context in which that film or set of films was made. This is not say that one can throw any and every cultural theory from the last hundred years at it, but rather that one approaches texts through research and scholarship that is sensitive to the particularities of the texts themselves. This is generally the direction that cinema studies has taken in the last few years and I think it's mostly the right one.

leo goldsmith wrote: At the recent cinema studies conference in London in March of this year, only a very small percentage of the papers presented were theory papers, where in the past they would have been the majority.

I don't think this is true, at least not widely. Textual analysis and film history are surely emphasized; canon-building, for whatever that's worth, is regarded suspiciously (as it should be), but mostly tacitly accepted.

That's good news. I left film academia in 1998, and Grand Theory (along with reception studies) was dominant. I'm glad to hear that it's swung back the other way.

goofbutton wrote:Are any of the other BFI series worth picking up? I'm especially interested in the THIN RED LINE and EYES WIDE SHUT volumes.

I'd also like to second the recommendation for The Thin Red Line BFI book. It is excellent. Very well written and with some pretty decent analysis. I'd also recommend Manhola Dargis' book on L.A. Confidential which is very well researched (she interviewed both Ellroy and Hanson) and provides excellent insight into L.A.'s history and how it ties into the movie. A really good read if you're a fan of the movie.

I'd also recommend BFI's Reader series -- Science Fiction/Horror, Action/Spectacle Cinema, and American Independent Cinema. They are basically collections of the articles, reviews and interviews from back issues of Sight and Sound. Kind of the best of the best I guess you'd say. I have the above three anthologies and they are excellent cross-sections of their respective genres. Definitely worth picking up.

Some comments about Robin Wood, CineAction, and the question of theory in film writing:
Wood is probably my favorite film critic. His writing has explored with great insight and depth the social/political dimension that I believe is vital to really understanding most films and the context in which they were made, which is so lacking or undeveloped in the writings of so many others. And perhaps more importantly for his readers, his writing is stimulating, accessible, clear, and contains infectious enthusiasm and personal feeling. I can't help feeling a bit dismayed that in his endeavor to write novels (none of which have seen print) he chose to stop writing film books altogether at the very peak of his powers. I hope the publishers at BFI will be able to coax a few more extended essays from him for their series, at the least.

CineAction isn't "Wood's," it's an entire collective of which he is just one part. Sometimes he contributes several articles to a single issue, but usually he is not the predominating influence. Unfortunately, it's not an easy magazine to find. (Some Borders stores might have it; I don't shop there.) The articles are not available free online anywhere. Most libraries are unlikely to have it, even university libraries unless they have some kind of film studies program. For those who have read it and liked it, the best ways to keep getting it are probably to subscribe or urge local libraries to order it. I'm convinced that it's accessible and thought-provoking enough that it could develop really significant readership if more people knew about it and had access to it.

Finally, I think the question about theory is: to what extent can theory be explored without introducing so much esoteric language that people outside of specialized academic programs are shut out? I believe that all writing, and thus all film writing, contains theory. It's just that most of the time the writer doesn't bring it to the surface or explore it, and may not even have a conscious understanding of it. Most film reviewers, for example, make all sorts of theoretical assumptions that often result in very tedious viewpoints and arguments that are so loosely structured that if you touch them they fall apart. The best film critics have a solid understanding of whatever theory is in their view most relevant to theit subject and will explore it as needed in the aid of a broader project of conveying something more fundamentally important to readers in terms that will be meaningful to them. The writing can be accessible because it contains some theory but is not about the theory. This is what I believe many academic film scholars have failed to do. Perhaps there used to be a time when the more esoteric writing by scholars provided a topos or "place" from which more accesible writers (critics and reviewers) could approach films for different but related purposes. However, it seems to me that in the last couple of decades, there has been a huge gulf between the two areas of writing. This is part of a more general trend toward specialization and esotericism in the Anglo-American humanities and social sciences, which in my view was largely a result of the vast influences of continental theory.

Excellent post, Gregory. I should check out Wood, especially after hearing of his "infectious enthusiasm and personal feeling," characteristics unfortunately absent from so much serious writing (perhaps because those warm elements doesn't convey the sense of detached Cool too many writers require of themselves), and characteristics I'd like to permeate my own writing and conversation. And I agree that theory needs not be alienating, so long as it is treated as means to more comprehensive understanding and not an end in itself. Hell, we all seem to agree on that in this thread! It's really up to intelligent writers with an appreciation for theory to introduce the ideas of theory more accessibly since, given the exclusiveness of high academia, the writers brought up in such esoteric schools are not going to "dumb down" (as they may unfortunately see it) to a more general readership. It's great to hear others concerned about this.

Also, thanks Langlois and Leo for filling in some of the gaps in my conception of these film theory debates.